Applying linear growth

All the models we built in the previous chapters had the default growth mode, linear. This means that the trend consists of a straight, sloped line, or potentially, a few straight, sloped lines connected at changepoints – a case we will explore in Chapter 8, Influencing Trend Changepoints. For now, though, let’s load up our Divvy data again and focus on the growth.

We’re going to import pandas, matplotlib, and Prophet again, but this time, we’ll also import a new function from Prophet’s plot package, add_changepoints_to_plot, as follows:

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from prophet import Prophet
from prophet.plot import add_changepoints_to_plot

This new function will allow us to easily plot our trend line directly on our forecast plot.

As we’ve done previously, let’s open the Divvy data and load it into our training DataFrame:

df = pd.read_csv('divvy_daily.csv')
df...